Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Will New Democratic Party Controlled Congress, Investigate Secret Republican "Orgs"?

host · 11-14-2006, 12:24 AM

What will change, in the new congress, is that, for the first time since, Nov., 2003, house committees chaired by democrats will decide who and what to investigate, and they will have subpoena power. If these folks have nothing to hide, why the secrecy?

I have more on Abramoff and his Africa activities, and how they link to other CNP members. To avoid confusion, I'll post that info seperately.

In this curious organization, who leads, who follows.....is Canadian political leadership, "on board", now, too?

ABC removed the link in the OP story, in the apparently revised version that I had posted. It originally contained a link to this:

Quote:

http://web.archive.org/web/200212021...1.html#sidebar
Who's Who at the CNP

According to a membership roster obtained by Institute for First Amendment Studies, notable former and current Council for National Politics members include:

Attorney General John Ashcroft and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson. (Both are no longer members).

Christian businessmen like Holland and Jeffrey Coors, of the brewing company, and entrepreneur and Orlando Magic owner Rich DeVos.

Two of fundamentalist Christianity's most prominent end-of-the-world theologists: John Ankerberg, who believes that biblical prophecies were literal promises and are coming true; and Dave Breese, who hosts The King Is Coming, a show devoted entirely to Christian eschatology. Also: Chuck Missler, an Idaho radio host who has predicted an imminent invasion of Jerusalem by forces guided by the Antichrist.

Former presidential candidate and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson; former Texas GOP Rep. Steve Stockman, who stunned the political world in 1994 by ousting House Judiciary Chairman Jack Brooks from his seat; the Rev. Don Wildmon of the American Family Association.

Christian reconstructionists like Rousas J. Rushdoony.

Williams, the founder of BAMPAC, a political action committee that promotes black conservatism.

Sam Moore, president of Thomas Nelson, the country's most successful Christian book publishing company.

Prominent creationist Henry Morris; political scientist Dora Kingsley; Red Cross board member Ann Drexel; Rutherford Institute founder John Whitehead.

Center-right coalitionist Grover Norquist and values activist Phyllis Schlafly.

Oliver North, whose speeches to CNP members during the height of his involvement in Iran-Contra stirred up debate.

Quote:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/polit...-gop-bush.html
May 19, 2000

THE GOVERNOR'S SPEECH
Bush's Words to Staunchly Conservative Group Remain a Mystery
By JIM YARDLEY

THE 2000 CAMPAIGN

HOUSTON, May 18 -- The Council for National Policy is a little known group whose members are often very well known and very conservative. There are radio personalities like Oliver L. North and James C. Dobson; religious broadcasters like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell; and lawmakers like Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Representative Dick Armey of Texas.

It is the sort of group a Republican presidential hopeful would presumably want to address, which is exactly what Gov. George W. Bush of Texas did last October when the council held a two-day conference in San Antonio. But what exactly did Mr. Bush say?

Skipp Porteous has tried to find out, though as yet without success. Mr. Porteous is national director of the Institute for First Amendment Studies, a Massachusetts-based group with about 3,000 members nationwide that tries to keep watch on the council. He regards the council as a secretive umbrella group plotting strategy for the Republican right.

The council says such talk is silly. It calls itself a nonpartisan educational foundation.

In recent years, Mr. Porteous said his group had planted a spy in several meetings.

But he found his group shut out when the council met in San Antonio.

Eager to know what Mr. Bush might say in private to conservative leaders, Mr. Porteous sent for audiotapes of the conference. The council sells audiotapes of conferences to members only, but the institute had obtained an order form from the company, Skynet Media, that handles the recording.

So when a package arrived earlier this year, Mr. Porteous thought success was at hand. But the tape of Mr. Bush's speech was not included.

Morton C. Blackwell, the council's executive director, said all speakers were asked for permission to include their remarks on the tapes and that the Bush campaign had declined.

"The Bush entourage said they preferred that the tape not go out, though I could not see any reason why they shouldn't," he said.

He added: "It was a standard speech, basically the same one. Basically everything he said, he's said before, and I've heard since."

Ari Fleischer, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, said if anyone was "hoping to hear something that the governor would say that he hasn't said publicly, then they're on a wild goose chase." He declined to characterize the speech, saying, "When we go to meetings that are private, they remain private."

In fact, Mr. Fleischer said, "as far as we know, there is no tape."

But Mr. Blackwell said the Bush campaign should have a copy.

Curt Morse, president of the recording company, Skynet Media, said that he had a copy and that one was provided to the campaign after the speech.

"Maybe they lost it," he said.

He offered to make them a copy.

Stephen Harper's <a href="http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20051213/elxn_harper_speech_text_051214/20051214/">1997 speech</a>, in Montreal to the CNP, was used earlier this year, in campaign ads by losing Canadian PM, Paul Martin:

Quote:

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNew...e=election2006
Ad wasn't an attack on military: Paul Martin

Updated Thu. Jan. 12 2006 2:52 PM ET

CTV.ca News Staff

........Martin added: "You can't do that if it's spread out all across the country."

He then spoke on the difference in values that exists between his policies and those of the Tory Leader.

"(Harper) said that his views have not changed in 10 years. So if you take a look at our ads, what we have simply done is said, 'this is what Stephen Harper has said'," Martin told Canada AM co-host Beverly Thomson.

The Liberal Leader pointed to a speech that Harper gave in 1997 to the Council for National Policy, a right wing American think tank, in which he referred to Canada as a "northern European welfare state, in the worst sense of the term."

"Those are his words," said Martin. "He has said those are still his views. He said Canada was second rate -- that was his view."

The Conservatives have claimed that those comments, including one in which Harper told U.S. conservatives that their movement was a "a light and an inspiration to people in this country and across the world," were meant to be "tongue-in-cheek."

But Martin said those statements are indicative of the far right views harboured by the Tory Leader. "I don't share the views of the far right Conservative groups in the United States. And so that's the chasm between us and that's where the debate should take place," said Martin.

The Liberal Leader then took a series of questions from Canadians on a wide-range of topics. ........

Until 2001, Morton Blackwell, the genius political organizer who you probably never heard of, was executive director of CNP, during the 1990's, this CNP founder always held a CNP office. He trained "college Republicans" leaders, Abramoff, Norquist, Reed:

Quote:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Conten...nwtca.asp?pg=2

......A shared passion for conservative activism--not the most common passion on campuses in Massachusetts--led him to a friendship with Norquist, a Harvard graduate student. Together they organized students for the 1980 Reagan campaign in their state, which Reagan, miraculously, carried. After graduation they launched a campaign to take over a sleepy, Washington-based subsidiary of the Republican National Committee called College Republicans.</a> Abramoff spent $10,000 of personal money winning the chairmanship. With Norquist as executive director, he transformed CR into a "right-wing version of a communist cell--complete with purges of in-house dissenters and covert missions to destroy the enemy left," as <a href="http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/000308.php">Nina Easton puts it</a> in her useful history, Gang of Five.

Easton's sensibility may seem a bit delicate, but she well captures the revolutionary mood among the young idealists who came to Washington after Reagan's inauguration in 1981, among whom Abramoff and Norquist were the loudest and most energetic. They were soon joined by Reed, freshly graduated from the University of Georgia and looking even younger then than he does now, if you can imagine. Borrowing tactics from their leftist counterparts, College Republicans were particularly good at dramatizing the causes of limited government and anti-communism. When the Soviet Union invaded Poland, they swarmed the Polish embassy in Washington and burned the Soviet flag for news cameras. They staged counter-demonstrations to those put on by the useful idiots of the nuclear-freeze movement. At late-night gatherings they sang age-old anarchist anthems that Norquist had taught them. You could tell a College Republican by the buttons he wore: "There's no government like no government," for example.

After College Republicans, Abramoff brought the same theatricality to his other activist jobs. "His greatest strength was his audacity," says the writer and political consultant Jeff Bell, who worked with Abramoff and Norquist at a Reaganite group called Citizens for America in the mid-1980s. "He and Grover were just wildmen. They always were willing to throw the long ball. Jack's specialty was the spectacular--huge, larger-than-life, almost Hollywood-like events." As the group's chairman, Abramoff staged his greatest spectacular in 1985, a "summit meeting" of freedom-fighters from around the world, held in a remote corner of the African bush. Among the summiteers was Adolfo Calero, a leader of the Nicaraguan contras, and playing host was a favorite of the 1980s conservative movement, the Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi, who fought bravely against the Cuban occupiers of his country but turned out, alas, to be a Maoist cannibal. In her book Easton reports that both Abramoff and Norquist, who had been hired as Abramoff's assistant, were later dismissed from CFA for "lavish spending."........

Quote:

http://www.leadershipinstitute.org/a...section=morton
Morton C. Blackwell

Professionally, Morton Blackwell is the president of the Leadership Institute, a non-partisan educational foundation he founded in 1979...... [host sez....yup....it really reads "non-partisan" !]

.....In youth politics, Mr. Blackwell was a College Republican state chairman and a Young Republican state chairman in Louisiana.

He served on the Young Republican National Committee for more than a dozen years, rising to the position of Young Republican National Federation national vice chairman at large.

Off and on for five years, 1965-1970, he worked as executive director of the College Republican National Committee under four consecutive College Republican national chairmen.....

In 1980, he organized and oversaw the national youth effort for Ronald Reagan.

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...801588_pf.html
The Fast Rise and Steep Fall of Jack Abramoff
How a Well-Connected Lobbyist Became the Center of a Far-Reaching Corruption Scandal

By Susan Schmidt and James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 29, 2005; A01

.....Hints of Trouble

A quarter of a century ago, Abramoff and anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist were fellow Young Turks of the Reagan revolution. They organized Massachusetts college campuses in the 1980 election -- Abramoff while he was an undergraduate at Brandeis and Norquist at Harvard Business School -- to help Ronald Reagan pull an upset in the state......

The Wapo's "steno Sue" Schmidt, won a pulitzer prize for her reporting about Jack Abramoff. If you click on the link in the preceding quote box, you will see the correction, at the top of the article, that resulted from an email that I sent to Wapo ombudsman, Deborah Howell. I pointed her to this newspaper clipping that I found while researching Abramoff's background:
http://scandal.atspace.com/mob.html

Doesn't it seem more likely than not, that....in 1980, from the information diplayed in the 2 preceding quote boxes, that CNP pioneer, Morton Blackwell, became acquainted with Jack Abramoff? Later reporting indicates that both Abramoff and Norquist became CNP members, and that Norquist is still a member.....

Quote:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/...rts/index.html
Delegates mock Kerry with 'purple heart' bandages
Democrats: GOP 'mocking our troops'

Wednesday, September 1, 2004 Posted: 12:43 PM EDT (1643 GMT)

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Delegates to the Republican National Convention found a new way to take a jab at Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's Vietnam service record: by sporting adhesive bandages with small purple hearts on them.

Morton Blackwell, a prominent Virginia delegate, has been handing out the heart-covered bandages to delegates, who've worn them on their chins, cheeks, the backs of their hands and other places.

Blackwell is president of the Leadership Institute, an educational foundation he founded in 1979. According to its Web site, the institute prepares conservatives for success in politics, government and the news media.....

Quote:

http://www.policycounsel.org/18856/3...ession*id*val*
<img src="http://www.policycounsel.org/img/content/37701_37703.gif">

Morton C. Blackwell - executive director, Council for National Policy; founder and president, The Leadership Institute; founder and chairman, Conservative Leadership PAC; Republican National Committeeman from Virginia; treasurer, Reagan Alumni Association; treasurer, Free Congress Foundation; member, Executive Committee, National Right to Work Committee; president, Legislative Studies Institute; member, Arlington County Republican Committee; former Special Assistant to President Reagan on the White House Staff; former staff member, Senate Republican Policy Committee; former policy director, U.S. Senator Gordon J. Humphrey; overseer, 1980 Youth for Reagan effort; former editor, The New Right Report; former contributing editor, Conservative Digest. Spouse - Helen. Arlington, Virginia.

<img src="http://www.policycounsel.org/img/content/37701_51301.gif">
.....When I founded the Leadership Institute in 1979, almost every other conservative educational foundation focused on issues and philosophy. That's wonderful work. I wish more of it were done. I benefit greatly from education from such foundations. The Leadership Institute does a little of such work, but education on issues and philosophy is not its primary role.

The mission of my foundation is very clear: to locate, recruit, train and place people in the public policy process. Conservatives are more successful as the number and the effectiveness of conservative activists increases across America.

Donors understand what I'm doing. They may support several foundations which specialize in issue and policy education, but they clearly see the uniqueness and the importance of the Leadership Institute.

I often give my students good books which cover issues and philosophy, but I focus on identifying, recruiting, training and placing people. Nobody else was doing just that. There was a market for the product of my new organization.

Think of an area of activity where more or better work should be done. Be able to express your group's mission in a short, clear statement. In marketing, this is called finding your niche.

It doesn't make much sense for you to try to start a group if there already is a nationwide organization doing a first-class job performing the same mission. It would probably make no sense at all for you to decide, "I'm going to create a rival to the National Right to Work Committee." The National Right to Work Committee is doing a great job of grassroots lobbying. But there are not many such examples.

You might consider a type of activity in which existing groups do things but the demand for that kind of work exceeds the supply. If existing non-profit groups aren't even close to doing all that needs to be done, you might be able to bring extra resources to the policy battle by starting a new group.

If your prospective new group's work is to be one of the main projects of your life, and it should be, make sure you have a strong and abiding interest in what it will be doing...

Quote:

http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feat...ell/index.html

My right-wing degree

How I learned to convert liberal campuses into conservative havens at Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute, alma mater of Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Jeff Gannon and two Miss Americas.

By Jeff Horwitz
Pages 1 <a href="http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/05/25/blackwell/index.html?pn=2">2</a> <a href="http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/05/25/blackwell/index.html?pn=3">3</a>

May 25, 2005 | One recent Sunday, at Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute, a dozen students meet for the second and final day of training in grass-roots youth politics. All are earnest, idealistic and as right wing as you can get. They take careful notes as instructor Paul Gourley teaches them how to rig a campus mock election.

It's nothing illegal -- no ballot stuffing necessary, even at the most liberal colleges. First you find a nonpartisan campus group to sponsor the election, so you can't be accused of cheating. Next, volunteer to organize the thing. College students are lazy, and they'll probably let you. Always keep in mind that a rigged mock election is all about location, location, location.

"Can anyone tell me," asks Gourley, a veteran mock electioneer, "why you don't want the polling place in the cafeteria?"

Stephen, a shy antiabortion activist sitting toward the rear of the class, raises his hand: "Because you want to suppress the vote?"

"Stephen has the right answer!" Gourley exclaims, tossing Stephen his prize, a copy of Robert Bork's "Slouching Toward Gomorrah."

The students, strait-laced kids from good colleges, seem unconvinced. The lesson -- that with sufficient organization, the act of voting becomes less a basic right than a tactical maneuver -- doesn't sit easy with some students at first. Gourley, a charismatic senior from South Dakota and the treasurer of the College Republican National Committee, assures them: "This is not anti-democracy. This is not shady. Just put [the polling place] somewhere where you might have to put a little bit of effort into voting." The rest, Gourley explains, is just a matter of turnout.

When the state or national candidate you're backing wins by a suitably large margin, as he or she surely will, have the nonpartisan group that sponsored the election sign off on your prewritten celebratory press release and send it statewide. Reporters will almost certainly ignore it, but after a dozen similar victories, they'll start dashing off articles about the youth phenomenon behind your candidate's campaign -- or better yet, just start plagiarizing your press releases.

There is no better place to master the art of mock-election rigging -- and there is no better master than Morton Blackwell, who invented the trick in 1964 and has been teaching it ever since. Blackwell's half-century career in conservative grass-roots politics coincides neatly with the fortunes of the conservative movement: He was there when Goldwater lost, when Southern voters abandoned the Democratic Party in droves, and when the Moral Majority began its harvest of evangelical Christian voters. In the 1970s, Blackwell worked with conservative direct-mail king Richard Viguerie; in 1980, he led Reagan's youth campaign. Recently, he's been fighting to save Tom DeLay's job.

Yet Blackwell's foundation, the Leadership Institute, is not a Republican organization. It's a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) charity, drawing the overwhelming majority of its $9.1 million annual budget from tax-deductible donations. Despite its legally required "neutrality," the institute is one of the best investments the conservative movement has ever made. Its walls are plastered with framed headshots of former students -- hundreds of state and local legislators sprinkled with smiling members of the U.S. Congress, and even the perky faces of two recently crowned Miss Americas. Thirty-five years ago, Blackwell dispatched a particularly promising 17-year-old pupil named Karl Rove to run a youth campaign in Illinois; Jeff Gannon, a far less impressive student, attended the Leadership Institute's Broadcast Journalism School.

The institute's classes aren't tickets into an exclusive and shadowy club, however: I am also an institute graduate. In March, I attended its Youth Leadership School, a one-weekend, 28-hour crash course in political organizing. Registration was open to the public and cost $60, which got me a sourcebook, six free meals, up to three nights in a dorm, and a six-hour lecture on political principles delivered by the 65-year-old Blackwell himself. The morning I arrived at the Leadership Institute, I identified myself as a reporter for Salon. "That's great," said communications director Michelle Miller. By the end of the weekend, Blackwell took me on a tour of the headquarters, chatted with me for nearly an hour, and gave me a copy of the institute's antisocialism in-house film, "The Roots of the Ultra Left." The institute is a very friendly place.

Over the last 25 years, more than 40,000 young conservatives have been trained at the institute's Arlington, Va., headquarters in everything from TV makeup for aspiring right-wing talking heads to prep courses for the State Department's Foreign Service exam. Classes are taught by volunteers recruited from the ranks of the conservative movement's most talented organizers, operatives and communicators.

The Leadership Institute has succeeded, in part, because it's had little to no competition from the left. College campuses may still be havens for liberal thought, but the right-wing students are the ones organized enough to win major battles. Perhaps expecting that American youth would organize themselves as they did in decades past, progressive organizations have been outstripped by their conservative counterparts in professionalizing the ragtag world of college activism. "When it comes to campus controversy, from affirmative action to free speech, the right wing pumps in money and expertise and shows [students] how to out-hustle their opponents," says David Halperin of the liberal Center for American Progress.

Still, Blackwell says conservatives are underdogs on college campuses. Conservative students may be better organized, but they're still outnumbered. The Leadership Institute contends that liberal higher education is robbing the conservative movement of new blood -- and thereby handicapping the institute's efforts. "You know, the most conservative students are the freshmen," Blackwell told me. "There is an acculturation there.".....

Next Page:<a href="http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/05/25/blackwell/index.html?pn=2">A Blackwell specialty: Stunts that enrage Democrats, like the "Purple Heart" Band-Aid gag</a>